Chandrakanta
by Devaki Nandan Khatri

Devaki Nandan Khatri (1861 - 1913) originally wrote his novel Chandrakanta for serial publication. When it was collected into a book, it was the
longest piece of modern Hindi prose to date. (However, the selection
offered on this site represents only the preface and the first thirty
pages of the novel.) Despite its age, it is a breezy and quite funny
read and remains a favorite classic in India.

The title character, Princess Chandrakanta of the kingdom of
Vijaygarh, is of marriageable age but will she marry her lover, the
dashing prince Virendra Singh of neighboring Naugarh, or will she be
forced to marry the conniving prime minister's son Krur Singh? In this
tale of intrigue and magic, the secret agents (known in Hindi as aiyyār—or aiyyārī in the feminine, which is important to know since Princess Chandrakanta
has her own team of female agents) of each side battle it out.

Despite the levity of the subject, Chandrakanta holds an
important place in Hindi literature. As the author argues in the
preface, his goal was to transmute the Urdu story-telling tradition
known as dāstān into a modern genre. The courtly setting and the intrigues of the aiyyārs, who are really spy-magicians, come straight out of the world of the dāstān.
However, unlike in the traditional genre, there is a modernizing
attempt to explain how seemingly magical things take place. Thus, the
ability of the aiyyār to impersonate anyone is explained by
make-up, and yet for a modern reader there is still something missing
because that is not a plausible explanation for how someone could appear
to become a completely different person. Unsatisfactory as such
explnanations may be, Devaki Nandan Khatri has managed to keep the zest
of the dāstān while appealing to the drive for Western-style
modernity in contemporary Hindi literature. Unfortunately in the process
of preparing the dāstān for a Hindi readership, an anti-Muslim bias creeps in. Thus the aiyyārs
working for the bad guys are Muslim (while those working for the good
guys have Hindu names) and they are wicked, weak and fanatical. Despite
demonizing Muslims, the story contains a large amount of vocabulary
derived from Persian and Arabic which we would think of as “Urdu” today.

The book has recently been translated into English by Manju Gupta under the title In the Mysterious Ruins.

Special thanks to Nabila Pirani and Zahra Sabri for their help in preparing the nastaliq version of the text available below.

-Arthur Dudney

On this page

The Hindi text of the story is available as a PDF with pages corresponding to the page numbers below. A nastaliq text is also available but the page numbers do not correspond to the glossary.

If the Hindi words below appear as boxes or nonsense, please see the introduction page for help.